A week after setting this July 31 deadline in hopes of getting a go-ahead from the Los Angeles City Council to build a football stadium in downtown L.A., AEG's Tim Leiweke lit up the Internet again by telling the Orange County Register about a handful of potential National Football League tenants.

Leiweke said five teams are "still in the mix" to move to Los Angeles. In the order he listed them, they are the St. Louis Rams, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Oakland Raiders, the San Diego Chargers and the Minnesota Vikings. Notable omissions from previous short lists? The San Francisco 49ers and the Buffalo Bills. Or didn't you hear those loud sighs of relief from the northern corners of the country?

Here, directly, is how the Register presented Leiweke's list of teams:

"St. Louis, Jacksonville, not extensively, certainly Oakland, San Diego, Minnesota are still in the mix," Leiweke said listing the teams AEG has met with before adding: "We're not packing any (moving) vans right now."

The Orange County Register report here also quoted Leiweke as saying his boss, billionaire Philip Anschutz, was prepared to buy a majority share of a team to facilitate its move to Los Angeles -- and to pay "the cost for an NFL franchise to get out of a current lease so as to relocate to Los Angeles." In San Diego's case, that cost is $24 million, a number that Leiweke apparently has at ready recall and doesn't need to look up in on page 21 of documents like this.

Leiweke told the newspaper: "Just as an example, if it's San Diego, they would have to pay $24 million under their agreement to get out of the lease. We would pay that."

The news prompted voiceofsandiego.org's Andrew Donohue to write on Twitter: "This just got serious," which in turn elicited this from me: "Well, it got seriouser. Paying $24m is not paying the NFL's $700m-plus LA relocation fee. AEG agrees to that, then: serious."

(A quick explainer: The Houston Texans, the last National Football League team to join the league, paid its owners $700 million for the privilege. Any team moving to L.A. might pay hundreds of millions of dollars as well, one of the many reasons why the city's been without an NFL team since the 1994 season.)

While digesting the Register report and follows by the Associated Press here, Yahoo! Sports here and Pro Football Talk here, I e-mailed Chargers' spokesman Mark Fabiani for his perspective.

I'll attach the full Q and A at the bottom of this blog post. For now, here's the upshot.

"The Chargers are not pursuing any stadium options in downtown Los Angeles," Fabiani said. "Our focus remains where is has been for the last nine years: Finding a publicly acceptable solution somewhere here in the San Diego region, with a particular focus at this time on the downtown San Diego combination stadium-convention center site."

He added, "The Spanos family has never contemplated – and will not contemplate – selling a majority stake in the team. So if AEG is seeking a majority stake in a team, it would probably be best for AEG to cross the Chargers off its wish list."